Plan of a slave ship design, showing how slaves were stowed, manacled, into the hold. Photograph: Christopher Jones/Bristol Museum (Image Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed)

When Taking Offence is More Profitable than Facing the Truth.

Words changed, memorials removed, and uncomfortable histories wiped, towards an outcome of Systemic Racism.

“The past has a disconcerting habit of bursting, uninvited and unwelcome, into the present”

• David Olusoga, the Observer, Sat 11 Jul 2015

So true.

The image in the header above is a glimpse of design effort that went into one of the biggest injustices ever carried out by one set of humans against another in known history.

Slavery.

Look at it again.

Think of being one of those manacled individuals in such an environment, for weeks, after being ripped away from family and friends to an unknown future of extreme fear, seemingly forever.

Pretty shocking, huh?

That image, per the source in the credit, comes from an artefact in Bristol Museum.

For me as a practicing Systems Engineer, the shock upon looking at the picture of the header image comes from a realisation that just about everyone in those days was involved in the atrocity. People just like me, Engineers, working now and then…